The journal Science is adding an extra round of statistical checks to its peer-review process, editor-in-chief Marcia McNutt announced today. The policy follows similar efforts from other journals, after widespread concern that basic mistakes in data analysis are contributing to the irreproducibility of many published research findings.

    “Readers must have confidence in the conclusions published in our journal,” writes McNutt in an editorial. Working with the American Statistical Association, the journal has appointed seven experts to a statistics board of reviewing editors (SBoRE). Manuscript will be flagged up for additional scrutiny by the journal’s internal editors, or by its existing Board of Reviewing Editors or by outside peer reviewers. The SBoRE panel will then find external statisticians to review these manuscripts.

    Asked whether any particular papers had impelled the change, McNutt said, “The creation of the ‘statistics board’ was motivated by concerns broadly with the application of statistics and data analysis in scientific research and is part of Science’s overall drive to increase reproducibility in the research we publish.”

    Giovanni Parmigiani, a biostatistician at the Harvard School of Public Health, a member of the SBoRE group, says he expects the board to “play primarily an advisory role.” He agreed to join because he “found the foresight behind the establishment of the SBoRE to be novel, unique and likely to have a lasting impact. This impact will not only be through the publications in Science itself, but hopefully through a larger group of publishing places that may want to model their approach after Science.”

    John Ioannidis, a physician who studies research methodology, says that the policy is “a most welcome step forward” and “long overdue.” “Most journals are weak in statistical review, and this damages the quality of what they publish. I think that, for the majority of scientific papers nowadays, statistical review is more essential than expert review,” he says. But he noted that biomedical journals such as Annals of Internal Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet pay strong attention to statistical review.

    Professional scientists are expected to know how to analyze data, but statistical errors are alarmingly common in published research, according to David Vaux, a cell biologist. Researchers should improve their standards, he wrote in 2012, but journals should also take a tougher line, “engaging reviewers who are statistically literate and editors who can verify the process”. Vaux says that Science’s idea to pass some papers to statisticians “has some merit, but a weakness is that it relies on the board of reviewing editors to identify ‘the papers that need scrutiny’ in the first place”.

答案精析：根据题干可直接定位至原文第二段第三句。要理解flag up需要对其前后文的文意进行分析。根据第三、四句的语义可知，杂志社的内部编辑、现有的评审编辑委员会或外部同行评审员将对稿件进行______，以备额外审查。然后，统计审核委员会将找到外部统计人员来审查这些稿件。把四个选项分别代入flag up可知marked（标记）一词最为贴切，故正确答案为B。

错项排除：原文指的是在提交稿件进行统计审核之前需要做的事情，已有的稿件不需要被found“发现”或stored“储存”，故排除A、D两项。C项revised有一定的干扰性，不太理解句意的考生会根据第二段中多次出现的review去判断flag up也应表达 “审核、修正”之意，但要注意，第二段最后一句中出现了then，说明前一句和后一句的动作发生有先后顺序之分，并不是并列的意义，故C项表述错误。